“When you put a page live, the question you should ask yourself is: ‘how can we absolutely guarantee that the searcher won’t click the back button?’ You know more about your business and products than anyone and it’s time to demonstrate.”

“We are absolutely confident that links are the single biggest ranking factor. But link building is hard. It’s hard to get people to link to you. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact value of an individual link.”

The two parts of their own research I appreciate the most are where they call out the easiest things to implement and the 10 things they’re confident are not important for rankings:

These two are pretty actionable and are different from what we see in most ranking factors articles.

“If you look at the search engine results pages, it’s clear that the top ranked sites don’t always have the most links, too. What this indicates is that ranking for Google is not necessarily a matter of making a list of ranking factors then creating a web page that conforms to that list.”

Montti details out the importance of thinking about the user and their goals, rather than trying to check the box and say you’ve hit a ranking factor.

It’s a strong reminder that Google no longer operates in this simplified ranking factor model, but rather, is using machine learning to constantly test user satisfaction.

This resource by Search Engine Land is a great way to visually see how the ranking factors interact and affect each other – positively and negatively.

Although last updated in 2017, it still has a large percentage of the known factors covered, and is a great resource for new SEO trainees or non-SEO marketing staff to understand the complex combination of factors.

It also vividly highlights some of the most negative factors such as cloaking and keyword stuffing.

Reminder: Ranking Factors Are Complex

It’s always worth repeating that nobody knows for sure the exact factors that come into play for ranking a site.

Even the top Google search engineers allegedly don’t fully know the exact model of the algorithms, so you can be sure that us humble SEO pros can only get so close.

The Takeaway

As with anything in life, you need to find the balance between execution and knowledge.

The 80/20 rule applies to Google ranking factors as much (or more) than anything in business.

The truth is, the top 20% (by volume) of factors account for more than 80 percent of the reason a site ranks.

So the actionable takeaway is to be aware of the vast majority of factors, but to really execute on the top ones that move the needle.

In practice, you may want to create an SEO decision matrix to best decide on what matters to you based on your own business, revenue, industry, and goals.

Only when you’ve perfectly implemented title tags, you’ve covered every big content topic in your industry, and you’ve earned every important link out there should you go worry about the minute, debatable factors.